The Irrationality—LB Roland

Sometimes I’ll stop at my stoop. The sight
of myself in the door
For the first time all day:
My hair deflated, a tie falling to one side,
I think of this morning.
The hour of work to brace
For a day of unwanted encounters
With chance passings of quarter-passed classmates,
And all the while Ohio arbitrates
Some bit of hostile weather.
Bedraggled by the beat of the day
I haven’t thought of myself.
And there at the doorstep I wait
And reflect.

At recess they spread themselves
So that no three girls coincides,
Early forms of gossip on their lips.
Through hopscotch and hula hoops,
The matrons cannot hear
The true discourse of girls’ laughter.
Plaid skirts dance across the quarter
Green on black eventually in shade
of the steeple of the cathedral.
At the height of the grotesques
Not even laughter penetrates, but
The exacting patterns of schoolgirls
Is fully revealed. Where they are going is plain.
At noon the tower bells peal just before the school bell’s buzz
Even at home the girls will hear the bells,
And think of the quiet plans they laid.
As skirts come off and are kicked aside,
The girls embark now free of the spires.

Cars are raindrops falling on downtown:
Most will splash into the gutters and flow out to fields;
Many will splatter against high-rise glass and glisten in the sun;
Some will collect in fetid grooves where pigeons drink,
and will end up dry-caked on the sordid surfaces of the city.

At germination it had all it needed to live
But the spark of living water. Once bathed it sprouts.
Shoots fighting towards the sun will grow, restive
Upwards, but roots unseen will sprawl ever out.

Beneath, the weaving tendrils will cling to earth
to seek for its woody flesh sustenance,
And too to hold against the wind its girth
Augmented by the height of its solar ascent.

It knows its terrain through every root’s raw tip
Thus preferring the softest filth for its vein.
Its crown knows not its goal though it may submit
And stoop for the radiant warmth of the sun.

Some ashes fall for being to fast erect
While others perish for terranean neglect.

What first drew me to her was a noble mien
not submitting to her baser being.

Her mind and soul surpass my own,
and my admiration waned to envy.

From her pen-holding hand, 
fell words of loft and import.

The laurel I wreathed her in,
it withered and shattered.

Bitter chaw filled her mouth,
and carelessness crept her feet.

She fell to Earth,
and though this placed her body at hand,

who wants an Earthly thing?

Some days the things I do are meaningless, 
And others I feel that they’ve meaning.
Why is that my philosophising always feels
As an excuse for my sex life?
I am bound as a book on a shelf, determined
Leather, fixed in an array of organisation.
The words there account for some physical manifestation,
And I am the map between them.

This winter has been far too sunny to be respite, my soul.

No chapped panes have framed the melancholy of my tragic face

When but two years have past since the winter of scourge, my heart.

Then, snow lined walks and bitten limbs pushed in the pussing of my being.

A room lined in poetry hidden in ivory towers, I frolicked in myself,

Revelled in knowing none.

Too many people I have since met,

Faces from drunken encounters at forgotten addresses in anonymous rooms fall on my eyes as snow to the windshield,

Countless many, gone an instant, uniquely the same.

This inexplicable plague has found me again the unsought after league of amiable acquaintances.

None are confidants.

The same occurred four years prior,

An entire microcosm of suburbia selected me their friend and king.

I didn’t know their names.

It was then that this narrative began: I, a man made myth in their eyes; they, a lowly mass of sameness in mine.

Did I dod this, did I want this?

What is a Burdick? I am become a name.

I swore then to fight… looseness? No. Sameness.

Yet what am I but the logical conclusion of that myth?

And what is that myth but the result of a childhood?

Are we not the same trajectory since ma first defenestrated?

But what was my childhood?

Clean carpets, brick walls, no food had taste, no music had movement, no caress of love.

I recall pain.

I remember surgery; inadequate sedation, lights, blue cloth, the smell of rubber and the feel of hands inside your head.

I have witnessed my body be torn and sown.

I do not remember the joy. I don’t.

Once after healing, my ears were tested

They lock you in a small room of quiet,

And the silence has a sound.

Not metaphorically, we are habituated to the sounds of society.

Life is silence, and silence will hum.

People used to be silence, but now they hum. They once made simple sounds of routine, I fear I’ve fallen deaf to them.

I remember kindergarten. My mother placed me with the flock

Crying I fled to be with her or even to not be them.

Since then I am locked step with them, though for that first-day betrayal always apart.

A score and one, a dozen and nine, one and twenty.

Every year my father gives me football cards, tokens of his partial dreams, collection of my filial guilt.

This winter I’ve bled out numb;

Fingers working too fast at buttons fumble and fail to feel the weave of the cotton.

Too long have I worn these thimbles.

Without a number to hide behind, I am now a man.

And one more year is done.

There was no joy in’t.

I will spend my last years again in pain, but the times between will be forgotten.

“Oh, your thighs
are numbered:

Two

But they are
as the poles of the earth”

Lovecraft’s men would crawl
To the centre of the Earth,
Betwixt the poles
Where they glimpse the darkness,
The absence, and the insanity
Of ultimate knowledge of their place
Within infinity
Drives them to shove the entirety
Of their being back into the abyss
From whence all man come
Forsaking the structures, the strands of reason,
Allowing the privilege of entering between those mad mountains,
Being lost in cultish devotion to the cyclopean god and all that they are,
A series of formal relationships between matter and cultural significance,
Being torn apart like of old.

The Sun sets on a Christmas eve, and so it is the night,
The night when half a world a way was birthed that holy light.
With stifled breaths and hurried hearts, we light the dark outside
With joy and cheer through all the year and love on Christmastide.
Each bulb hung high with care is set to twinkle in the cold,
Each a spark to light the dark with spirit manifold.
Although as I’ve gained my years, I don’t need this day as much,
Still I swear each year I’ll try to shine on just as much.
You see the presents and the garland once meant the world to me,
But now some how I hang them up just to let them be.
I love this day and always shall, but never as I did.
Yet nostalgic tears won’t stop to fill my glad eye lids.
O holy night, O silent night, the stars shine in the sky;
I’ll hope for thee in reverie once more before I die.

The weight of a booted foot is just enough
To pin the crab scuttling, righting itself
From the black wet of the dock where it fell
Leaving my hook now clean. The blue, flanged,
Scalloped backfins paddle against the grain
To swim out from this Dainite studded sole;
This rubber tread has pinned mountains before.
The spindly, knobbly, bifurcated chela
Pinches at the vamp not even scarring the hide
That the tanner has had torn from the horse.
How the insole subtly feels the crab;
The carapace is but a barrier
Felt underfoot indistinct from the cobble.
The blue of crab and the grey of river stone
Cannot be distinguished by touch alone.
Shifting my weight as if to step, the pebble
Or crab remains so my stance is out of kilter.
A stone would persist though I stand on even perch.